Access Rights

Users and access rights are set up in the user config. This is usually users.xml.

Users are recorded in the users section. Here is a fragment of the users.xml file:

  1. <!-- Users and ACL. -->
  2. <users>
  3.     <!-- If the user name is not specified, the 'default' user is used. -->
  4.     <default>
  5.         <!-- Password could be specified in plaintext or in SHA256 (in hex format).
  7.              If you want to specify password in plaintext (not recommended), place it in 'password' element.
  8.              Example: <password>qwerty</password>.
  9.              Password could be empty.
  11.              If you want to specify SHA256, place it in 'password_sha256_hex' element.
  12.              Example: <password_sha256_hex>65e84be33532fb784c48129675f9eff3a682b27168c0ea744b2cf58ee02337c5</password_sha256_hex>
  14.              How to generate decent password:
  15.              Execute: PASSWORD=$(base64 < /dev/urandom | head -c8); echo "$PASSWORD"; echo -n "$PASSWORD" | sha256sum | tr -d '-'
  16.              In first line will be password and in second - corresponding SHA256.
  17.         -->
  18.         <password></password>
  20.         <!-- A list of networks that access is allowed from.
  21.             Each list item has one of the following forms:
  22.             <ip> The IP address or subnet mask. For example: 198.51.100.0/24 or 2001:DB8::/32.
  23.             <host> Host name. For example: example01. A DNS query is made for verification, and all addresses obtained are compared with the address of the customer.
  24.             <host_regexp> Regular expression for host names. For example, ^example\d\d-\d\d-\d\.yandex\.ru$
  25.                 To check it, a DNS PTR request is made for the client's address and a regular expression is applied to the result.
  26.                 Then another DNS query is made for the result of the PTR query, and all received address are compared to the client address.
  27.                 We strongly recommend that the regex ends with \.yandex\.ru$.
  29.             If you are installing ClickHouse yourself, specify here:
  30.                 <networks>
  31.                         <ip>::/0</ip>
  32.                 </networks>
  33.         -->
  34.         <networks incl="networks" />
  36.         <!-- Settings profile for the user. -->
  37.         <profile>default</profile>
  39.         <!-- Quota for the user. -->
  40.         <quota>default</quota>
  41.     </default>
  43.     <!-- For requests from the Yandex.Metrica user interface via the API for data on specific counters. -->
  44.     <web>
  45.         <password></password>
  46.         <networks incl="networks" />
  47.         <profile>web</profile>
  48.         <quota>default</quota>
  49.         <allow_databases>
  50.            <database>test</database>
  51.         </allow_databases>
  52.     </web>

You can see a declaration from two users: defaultandweb. We added the web user separately.

The default user is chosen in cases when the username is not passed. The default user is also used for distributed query processing, if the configuration of the server or cluster doesn’t specify the user and password (see the section on the Distributed engine).

The user that is used for exchanging information between servers combined in a cluster must not have substantial restrictions or quotas – otherwise, distributed queries will fail.

The password is specified in clear text (not recommended) or in SHA-256. The hash isn’t salted. In this regard, you should not consider these passwords as providing security against potential malicious attacks. Rather, they are necessary for protection from employees.

A list of networks is specified that access is allowed from. In this example, the list of networks for both users is loaded from a separate file (/etc/metrika.xml) containing the networks substitution. Here is a fragment of it:

  1. <yandex>
  2.     ...
  3.     <networks>
  4.         <ip>::/64</ip>
  5.         <ip>203.0.113.0/24</ip>
  6.         <ip>2001:DB8::/32</ip>
  7.         ...
  8.     </networks>
  9. </yandex>

You could define this list of networks directly in users.xml, or in a file in the users.d directory (for more information, see the section “Configuration files“).

The config includes comments explaining how to open access from everywhere.

For use in production, only specify ip elements (IP addresses and their masks), since using host and hoost_regexp might cause extra latency.

Next the user settings profile is specified (see the section “Settings profiles“). You can specify the default profile, default'. The profile can have any name. You can specify the same profile for different users. The most important thing you can write in the settings profile is readonly=1, which ensures read-only access.
Then specify the quota to be used (see the section “Quotas“). You can specify the default quota: default. It is set in the config by default to only count resource usage, without restricting it. The quota can have any name. You can specify the same quota for different users – in this case, resource usage is calculated for each user individually.

In the optional <allow_databases> section, you can also specify a list of databases that the user can access. By default, all databases are available to the user. You can specify the default database. In this case, the user will receive access to the database by default.

Access to the system database is always allowed (since this database is used for processing queries).

The user can get a list of all databases and tables in them by using SHOW queries or system tables, even if access to individual databases isn’t allowed.

Database access is not related to the readonly setting. You can’t grant full access to one database and readonly access to another one.

Original article